We would fain have lingered among these pleasant isles, green with their abundant foliage, and contrasting admirably with the stern hills, towering over them, and so encircling this _Upper Lake_, that you see no place of egress, until you are close upon it. As for comparing it with the other lakes, or with Derwent-Water, as the fashion is,1 it ever appears to me the most ungrateful folly, to depreciate or to extol one scene of beauty by commending or condemning another; and when a man begins with, “Ah, but you should see so-and-so,” or “I assure you, my dear fellow, this is dreadfully inferior to what-d'ye-call-it,” I always most heartily wish him at the locality which he affects to admire. What nasty, niggardly, uncomfortable minds there are in this bilious world! How many men, who, forgetting that excellent round-hand copy, “Comparisons are odious,” are never happy but in detecting infelicities, and only strong when carping at weaknesses. Show them a pretty girl,--“she wants animation,” or “she wants repose,”--“she is overdressed,” or “her clothes, poor thing, must have been made in the village, and put on with a fork.”
1 Any one who takes delight in such comparisons may consult _Forbes's Ireland,_ vol. i., p. 229, or Mr. Curwen, whose conclusion is, “Killarney for a landscape, Windermere for a home.”
“You should see the youngest Miss Thingembob.” Tell them of a good day's covert-shooting you have had in my Lord's preserves,--out comes a note from their friend the Duke, who has beaten you by sixteen woodcocks. Trot out your new hunter, and “Oh, yes, he's a nice little horse, but will never carry _you_ with those forelegs. You must come over and look at an animal I've just got down from Tattersall's, by Snarler out of a Humbug mare, and well up to twenty stone, sir.”
It would perplex even these censorious gentlemen to find any fault with _the Long Range_ (which has nothing to do with Sir William Armstrong's Guns,--except that _the Cannon Rock_ at the entrance and _the Gun Rock_ by Brickeen Island have some resemblance to artillery)--that beautiful river, which leads from the Upper to the Middle and Lower Lakes. To float between its banks of dark grey stone, from which the green trees droop their glossy foliage, though, like the Alpine tannen,